That is the fate of the urban princess Anasztasia and the renegade
prince Matthias, born shockingly mortal to two immortal families. If
they go back in time and restore the witch’s humanity, she will grant
them immortality. She will also break a 550 year-old curse that
imprisons Matthias’s family in their ancestral homeland and exiles
Anasztasia’s family from it.

But to make their lives their own, the heirs must return to the most
dangerous day in their families’ past, Easter Sunday, 1457. This is the
day Vlad III, aka Dracula, massacred nobles.

How can Anasztasia and Matthias reverse the past when their families
won’t speak of their sins? How can they refuse when the witch owns their
lives?

Book Excerpt:

In a cave shaped by five centuries of the earth’s temper, the wind’s
hand, and the sky’s will, a witch stirs from beneath the dry leaves and
twigs that make up her resting place. She pushes herself through, then
brushes the blanket of brittle leaves from her furrowed face and
shriveled limbs. But after five centuries of sleeping and waking in a
bed of earth, she does not recognize foliage from skin.

She plants her emaciated feet on rough stones and drags herself
across the cave to the aged branches of her door, her steps shaky like
those of an infant learning to walk. The door grinds as it opens with
one silent command. The world outside her hovel is as it is inside—dark,
dank, musty, the bottom layers of centuries of overgrowth and the
absence of human vanity. Yet she hears everything, worms burrowing,
insects feeding, foliage breathing. They have been her companions and
teachers through the ages as much as they have been her nourishment.

Her bones slipping against the shell of her body, she stumbles toward
the ragged stump of an ancient beech. Over five centuries ago, she
snapped the sapling from its roots, nurturing its swell to remind
herself of the passage of the years, the turn of the centuries, and the
approach of salvation. It is as old and as dead in life as she is, but
it has kept her will strong and focus sharp.

Instead of resting her frail body on it, or sipping from the water
trickling over one of its gnarled roots and collecting in a hollow at
its base, she climbs onto it. She crawls to the middle, appearing no
bigger than a rodent on a master’s grand table. Her pupils are dull and
worn away, but she finds the first ring with her fingertips and begins
to count. One, two, three, four, five…It is slow and meticulous work for
one taught only the basics of language and numbers by those she once
served. But her voice is strong, her need to count a hunger, her focus
unrelenting.

Once she had magnificent eyes. Dark, almost black, alert and alive,
eager to see the world, to touch it and to know it. Her hair matched the
black of her eyes. Long and thick, it shone brighter than those nobles
with marigold hair. Once, she was a young woman, until the nobles of the
two warring families tore her from her family, wrenched her life from
her body and her soul from her flesh, turning her into what she is now.
Once, she had a name, a lovely, rhythmic name. But that was robbed from
her, too, and she inherited another name. Strigoaic. Witch. A witch who
was once a girl. A girl who once had a life. A life now trapped in
death.

The Strigoaic counts the rings without stopping, her voice moaning
through the clearing and the dense trees around it. She stops when her
fingers grasp a ring larger and more pronounced than the others. Her
heart begins to thump as it did when she first discovered it, as it did
in her human life. Slipping over the edge of the stump, her fingers
never leaving that ring of hope, she begins to count again, but from
one, to two, to three, all the way to eighteen.

She lowers her head, a drop of blood falling from her eyes.

Crawling back onto the stump, she lies on it, the pulse of the
ancient tree pounding against her palms and heating her chilled skin.

The time has come. After centuries of waiting, the time has come to
summon those two nobles who robbed her of her humanity. But it is not
them she wants. She has already punished them. She imprisoned one noble
and his family in the boundaries of the earth once known as their
homeland of Wallachia, while the other noble and his family she exiled
from it. Unwise about her sorcery, however, she imprisoned and exiled
them for eternity to an immortal life.

That will right itself in time, too. Now she wants—no, needs—the
last born of each family. She decreed them, and she will have them.
Clawing her fingers through the flesh of the stump, she lets a shrill
break from her lips that shakes birds and trees and mountains.

The time has come to get her name back.

About the Author

The Witch's Salvation is Francesca Pelaccia’s debut novel and the first book of The Witch's Trilogy. A teacher and now at long last an author, Francesca has written in other genres but enjoys creating and writing time-travel fantasies. Francesca blogs on the craft of writing especially as it relates to genre and reviews books.Currently she is working on the second book of The Witch’s Trilogy entitled The Witch’s Monastery. Visit Francesca at www.francescapelaccia.com.

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